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A neighborhood receives notices from a watch group that a sex offender is moving in. A woman takes the flyer to school to show to the other women. Cut to the offender, waking up at home. He finds one of the flyers crumpled in the trash.

Guys on the street wag the flyer in the face of a girl named Brenda. The offender finds an anonymous note on his doorstep telling him to move out. He works at a video store. The kids and one of the men posting flyers eye him. He closes up for the night. His car won't start.

Daylight, a headless body floats in the river.

Logan and Wheeler check out the corpse. Logan's not impressed with the decapitation workmanship. The body's fingers are burned off. Rogers tell them he was stabbed 15 times and probably decapitated with a hacksaw. They ID him. Kyle Jones, he pled guilty to statutory rape. He was 19, she was 15. He served five years and was staying at his mother's house.

They visit his mother. She shows Logan and Wheeler the flyers the neighborhood watch distributed. She said the police ticketed him every time he drove her car, thousands of dollars worth. His mom says it wasn't rape, he and the girl were in love. Her parents raised hell with the DA.

Cut to a girl in the back of a car, watching a news report on Kyle's death. Then a bar, the same report is met with cheers from the crowd, including the two guys from before. A third tries to buy beer with someone else's ID. The bartender takes it.

Logan and Wheeler find Kyle's car. Someone pulled the ignition fuse. They find the tickets: parking too close to a hydrant, parking too far from the curb, wheels at an angle. The tickets were all written by the same guy, a sergeant.

They talk to the video store owner, who says people canceled their memberships when he hired Kyle. He tells them who the loudest neighborhood watch people were.

They visit with two women, who mention Bob Goodman was involved as the driving force. They heard he was killed.

"One less thing to worry about," one says.

Bob tells the detectives that no one's sorry that Kyle is dead and his abili is neighborhood watch with the sergeant from 8:00 pm to 12:00 am. They visit the Sgt, who wrote 50 tickets in the last month. Logan tries to tell him the circumstances of the so-called rape, but the Sgt. says the girl gave a statement to the court about it.

Cut to gloved hands, moping up blood.

At the station, Logan says he'd like to talk to the girl, Nancy Williams. Her dad adamantly opposed Kyle's release at his parole hearings. Logan takes the dad while Wheeler finds Nancy. Mr. Williams is angry, but has an alibi concering his youngest child. Nancy was out of town, he says. She tells Wheeler she convinced herself that she was raped, but only after her parents hounded her to. A woman in the DA's office further convinced Nancy. She seems to have little remorse for lying on the stand and for Kyle's grizzly murder.

At the station, Capt. Ross introduces an old pal, Clete Dixon, a retired cop who tells them he's been going over his cases and thinks they may have a serial killer on their hands.

There are six other sex offenders murdered in the last 10 years in the tri-state area, all open cases. They all had their IDs obscured and were dumped in remote locations. In every case the body was mutilated, including two decapitations.

Rogers looks over the cases, and says only one resembles Kyle's killing. One was probably a suicide - a hanging where the body was found at the base of a cliff by the family who likely destroyed the rope. The similar one was as neat and methodical as Kyle's was sloppy. His tox screen comes back: he was positive for marijuana and barbiturates.

Wheeler and Logan give Dixon the news, that it's not a serial killer. He seems to take it well, blaming too much time on his hands.

Back at the station, Dixon is on the Faith Yancy show, saying that "sources in Major Case" agree that there's been a serial killer operating for a decade. Logan brushes it off by saying Dixon is just trying to make a name for himself.

Ross goes on TV and says point blank there is no connection between the cases. Meanwhile Dixon is on TV claiming the police are lying to cover their incompetence. He's on the show with the ADA who coaxed Nancy into claiming rape, saying that Kyle was a dangerous predator.

Ross tells the detective to make the ADA "dial it down." When the detectives speak to her, she says she knows Nancy has recanted, but doesn't care. She believes Kyle's sentence was just. Logan rants at her that Kyle didn't deserve what happened to him just for sleeping with the wrong girl. She tells Logan he's just frustrated they haven't caught their killer.

The detectives get back to work, deciding they need to talk to people in Kyle's neighborhood. At the courthouse already, they pick up any outstanding warrants on folks to get them to talk. A couple people tell them some kids were running their mouths about the murder, including the bartender who took the kid's fake ID.

They visit the guy to whom the stolen ID belongs, Jake Lally. His sister, Brenda, says it was a guy named Jamie who crashed a party at their house a few weeks ago with two other guys named Ricky and Lou.

Jamie says Ricky and Lou wanted him to act as a lookout during the murder. He tells Logan and Wheeler he didn't think they were going to go through with it. He says they didn't tell him anything specific but kept saying "the deed is done"

At Ricky's house his mother alibis him, saying they watch TV every night.

Back at the station, they look into Ricky and Lou. Both 20, unemployed, high school dropouts with small warrants. They decide to pull over Ricky's minivan for "multiple violations" and search it

Ricky smells like beer, has a broken tail light, expired inspection tags. Logan asks him if he's in a rush. Lou's in the passenger seat. There's new carpet in the back. Black light shows Luminol all over the place, which, if you've been watching your "CSI", you know is how they find traces of blood. Ricky and Lou profess ignorance about it, but Logan says, of course they know what it is they "probably saw it on some bad TV show." He points out there's also bleach everywhere, even on their shoes.

At Ricky's workshop, his hacksaw is missing. A tech finds barbiturates prescribed to Ricky's mom. Wheeler notices the fridge is locked. They open it and find, wrapped in butcher paper... a pot roast.

They find the guy who replaced the carpet in the minivan. Logan asks if they seemed mechanical. He says no.

At the station, the detective talk to Lou, who is nearly peeing down his leg. Wheeler tells him they found Kyle's blood on the other side of the drain cover. Lou says it wasn't his idea. Ricky wanted to impress Brenda (Jake's sister).

She says they bragged about it and had been talking about what it would feel like to kill somebody since high school. But she didn't think they'd do it.

Ricky denies hurting him, but says he gave Kyle a ride home and smoked a joint with him.

Ricky's computer shows he Googled the location where they dumped Kyle's body and ordered Luminol online. Logan comes in and tells Ricky that Lou is talking. Wheeler says Brenda says they offered to show her the head and that she called him a loser. This clearly bothers him. They pile on, saying she said he didn't have the balls to do it. He confesses to Kyle's murder. Then he keeps confessing, claiming responsibility for all the murders in the paper. They try to get him to give up details of the other murders, but he obviously doesn't know them. Then he backs down to just claiming Kyle and tries self-defense. But the 15 stab wounds in the back seem to dispute that.

Logan asks Ricky how it felt to kill.

"It wasn't as much fun as I thought it would be," Ricky says.

It was a lot of work and if he had it to do over, he wouldn't. He's also upset that he won't be famous.

Walking out, Logan asks him if he knows where the fuse box is on a Civic. Ricky gives him a blank stare. Logan goes to talk with the Sgt who was hounding Kyle, Logan pretends to confide in him that they found the head in a storage locker. The Sgt offers to say he saw the boys fiddling with Kyle's fuse box. Logan then asks him point-blank if he tampered with the fuse box while ticketing Kyle. Cop to cop, the Sgt says yes.

Back at the station, Logan tries to get Wheeler to go for a drink. She can't, she has plans with her fiance (played by Jilianne Nicholson's real-life husband, Jonathan Cake) who drops by and catches Logan flat-footed.

Ross and Logan share a drink, watching the ADA on the news, taking credit for the arrests.

"And once again," says Ross sardonically, "justice is served."

Ross notes that in their line of work the reason for murder is either tragic or stupid. Logan tells a story about one of his first cases, a body and trail of blood leading to man with a machete in his hand who claims it was an accident. Logan is disturbed by Ricky's murder of Kyle because he points out that commonly murder, if not for a clear reason, is done for some sick enjoyment.

"Neighborhood Watch" refers to an organized group of citizens devoted to crime and vandalism prevention within a neighborhood. In the episode, neighbors of Maspeth Creek organized to ban Kyle Jones out of the neighborhood since he was a registered sex offender and moved back home after jail.